Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Every city has its graveyard of nonprofits, cooperatives, social clubs, and community centers. Without a strategic vision, local projects cannot possibly amount to a systemic alternative to capitalism.
The Solidarity Research Center based in Los Angeles, California, was established in 2014 by a group of researchers and academics with roots in organized labor. Now they are working on projects across the country, linking the ethos of the labor movement and the dynamics of the cooperative economy to build and promote cooperatives across a wide range of sectors.
So solidarity economy is a relatively recent term. It is a number of things. It is a global movement to build an economy that works for people and planet and it is an alternative to capitalism. It is also a set or practices that align with solidarity economy principles.
Jackson Rising is the most important book I have read in a long time. Organizers are going to love it. If you wonder what democracy might look like in our time — here it is.
It’s tradition that limits our memories to Dr. King, WEB DuBois and a few others, when in actuality there were a plethora of African Americans creating and fighting for a new reality. James Boggs was one of these people.
In Jackson Rising, Akuno helps chronicle the history, present and future of one of the most dynamic yet under-documented experiments in radical social transformation taking place in the United States.
To escape this “capitalocentrism,” we need to broaden the definition of economy beyond capitalism. What if, instead, economy is all the ways that we meet our material needs and care for each other? And what if it’s not a singular thing? Then we would see that beneath the official capitalist economy are all sorts of thriving non-capitalist economies, where there may not be a profit motive or market exchange.
At the scale of local communities, abundance and human thriving are not exclusively based on the availability of material resources and energy but on human creativity and relationships. Community and individual prosperity depend on how we collaborate to create win-win-win solutions for all.
How can technology lead to more participation in democratic processes? Who should own and control city data? Can cities embrace a model that socializes data and encourages new forms of cooperativism and democratic innovation?
In this episode, we spoke with Cheyenna Weber, co-founder of SolidarityNYC and a lead organizer of the Cooperative Economics Alliance of NYC, or CEANYC. We talked with Weber about her work with SolidarityNYC and CEANYC and how these organizations support a growing solidarity economy in New York City and beyond.
Quebec’s social economy (also translated as “solidarity economy”) extends far beyond the province’s two major cities, and includes manufacturing, agricultural cooperatives, daycare centers, homecare services, affordable housing, social service initiatives, food co-ops, ecotourism, arts programs, public markets, media, and funeral homes.
At the Mutual Aid Network, we have developed a new type of networked cooperative — one that, among other things, lets people find talented collaborators for personal, neighborhood-wide, or even city-wide projects.
